"This isn't new… we met the summer before freshman year."
"Tell me."
"Noah—"
"Tell me. From the beginning."
I looked at the wall. I couldn't look at him. The words were stuck somewhere between my chest and my throat, two years of keeping them down making them hard to move.
"He worked at the marina with me at Brackett Lake. His family has a summer house and Alex crashed their boat into the dock."
"What?"
"Yeah. He came flying in, crashed the boat. It was this big thing."
"Then how did he—"
"His dad made him work it off like some kind of punishment. Work with the poors."
Noah scoffed and shook his head.
"And it was four weeks." My throat felt thick. "That's all it was. We rowed together once, we talked—there was something there I'd never felt before. With anyone."
I could hear myself saying these words in the dark of my dorm room and they sounded different out loud than they had inside my head. Inside my head they'd been abstract—feelings I could contain, manage, shove into a box. But spoken, they were real.
They had weight. They took up space in the room between us.
"And then he found out I was going to Riverside and he ended it."
The words hung in the quiet. I hadn't said that out loud before. Not once. And hearing it in my own voice—hearing how simple and brutal it was—made something warm creep up from my chest into my face. I'd just been so angry I'd never let myself feel the—
"He hurt me," I said. The words came out surprised, like I was finding that out for the first time. "I was so pissed at him for so long I didn't—I never let myself just—"
"You buried it," Noah said.
"I convinced myself it was nothing. Confusion. Whatever." I looked at the ceiling. "Met Emily, tried to be—normal."
"That crazy man, and you've been holding all of that back?"
"Yeah." Something cracked in my voice. "More than I thought."
Noah slid off his chair and came to sit next to me on the bed. Didn't say anything. Just sat there. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of another person—someone who wasn't goinganywhere, wasn't judging, wasn't asking me to be different than I was.
"He's everything. He's just—he's it. He's been it since that summer and I've tried to convince myself otherwise and… I'm so tired."
I stared at my hands like they belonged to someone else—they were shaking.
And then the tears came.
I hadn't expected them. Hadn't wanted them. Had absolutely no control over them.
Hot and burning, pressing up through my eyes before I could stop them, and once they started they didn't stop—just this silent, humiliating collapse of everything I'd been holding together for months. Years. The effort of pretending. The exhaustion of performing. The grief of wanting something I'd told myself I couldn't have.
"Hey," Noah said.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
